


Okay Again

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Accidents with Consequences, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 06:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12163494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: It was an accident, really, an accident that caused it all. (And it would never be okay again, at least not in Zuko's eyes)





	Okay Again

**Author's Note:**

> ATLA is my oldest fandom and like??? I never wrote about it???? How. Anyways, have this! I hope you enjoy!

For a day that would end with him in the ER waiting room, March 20th started out fairly well for Zuko. Sure, there was school in the morning for half of the day, but school was bearable now that everyone didn’t hate him. He didn’t have many friends in his own grade, but he had Katara and Aang and Toph from the grade below his to hang out with during study halls and lunch and classes that they shared, and that was more than enough for him. 

“You should come to the party tonight.” Katara said just before he got in his car to go home. “Technically, it’s Sokka’s party, but it’s at my house and it’ll be fun.”

Zuko wanted to turn the offer down, to spend the first night of spring break alone and just relax, but it was hard to refuse when Katara seemed so certain that things would go well. But he doubted he would be wanted there. Even if Sokka would hang out with him sometimes, they were distant acquaintances at best and his main complaint about Zuko was that he was a buzzkill, which would be pretty bad for a party. “I don’t think he’d want me there.” He reminded her, and Katara scoffed at that analysis.

“Don’t be stupid. He practically invited half the school. He wants _everyone_ there, I promise.” The wind in the parking lot that was caused mainly by a football player’s giant truck blew Katara’s hair into her face and Zuko was struck by the incredibly stupid impulse to tuck it behind her ear. He couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like for his fingers to brush across her face (or maybe even for his lips to touch hers because screw it, his face would be right there) and for a second, he was actually grateful for the scar across the left side of his face because at least it meant Katara couldn’t see him blushing beneath it. 

“You’re sure?” He asked, opening the door of his car and throwing his backpack in the back seat. 

“I’d bet my life on it.” Katara told him, giving him a small smile as her bus pulled up. “It starts at seven. I better see you there!”

“You will.” He promised as she walked away, all but running to get onto the bus in time. Zuko almost wanted to offer her a ride home, but he decided against it. Things were still a bit chaotic with his uncle setting up the tea shop downstairs and he didn’t want Katara to end up spending her free time helping him again. She did enough for Zuko already. 

Once he returned home and finished up clearing space for another table, Iroh handed him a cup of tea. “Any plans for tonight?” He asked, a hopeful smile on his face. 

“I got invited to a party, so I’ll be going there.” Zuko told him, trying to sound nonchalant about the whole affair. He didn’t get invited to many parties and even if Uncle Iroh’s excitement about the whole things was sort of annoying, he couldn’t help but be somewhat happy. Sure, it would be a lot of people he didn’t like, but his friends would be there. Zuko had friends now. Enough friends to warrant him showing up to things like parties and he didn’t have to worry about asking his father or even dealing with his father at all. Things finally seemed like they were looking up for him. 

***

An hour into the party, Zuko mentally recanted his statement that things were looking up for him. It had been fine at first. He got there five minutes late, not wanting to be the first person there, and arrived somewhere in the middle of things. He found Aang first and ended up awkwardly at the edge of his group, trying to find a place where he could jump in. Aang had too many friends for Zuko to even try and keep track of and none of them seemed to want to be near him. A few glares after ten minutes was enough for him to get lost, muttering some weak excuse to Aang about getting soda. Aang, for all of his supposed cleverness, was completely fooled. 

Then there was Azula. Of course Azula would arrive, not wanting a single thing in the world to go on without her being somehow involved. “Having fun, Zuzu?” She asked mockingly, poking his shoulder as she grabbed a Cherry Coke. 

“I’m having a blast.” He deadpanned, unsure what it was she wanted from him and not wanting to be near her long enough to find out. As much as he worried and agonized over Azula, she was still so much under her father’s thumb that she was dangerous to be around. “Now get lost.”

“You’re so mean, Zuko! See, this is why you have no friends. You should try being nice. Like me.” Azula’s smile was all teeth and she flounced off, safe in her circle of loyal followers.

And then there was the goddamn pinata. Sokka strung it up above his head a while later and before he could move, he cracked it open and Zuko ended up covered in glitter and confetti and god-knows-what. Pieces of candy fell down his shirt and into his shoes and got everywhere. It was a stupid prank, but a stupid prank done at the wrong time and Zuko felt the familiar, indignant rage that he spent so much time trying to get rid of rise up in his chest and once he was out of the view of most of the party guests (he could still heat their laughter echo in his ears and Zuko wanted to scream that he was above them, above all of them, he was Zuko Harada and he was _better than this_ ), he grabbed Sokka by the collar of his shirt. 

“What the fuck was that for?!” He asked, taking advantage of his grip to shove Sokka back.

“It was just a prank!” Sokka defended, regaining his balance and glaring at Zuko. “And if you had, oh, I don’t know, a sense of humor? Maybe you would know that.”

“It wasn’t funny. It was stupid. It made me look stupid.” Zuko said, rolling his eyes at Sokka and his weak defense and the whole party in general. He was raised to be better than this, to be the best and be above things like high school parties and pranks, but he could never do it and now he was stuck with everyone else but with a stupid pride he had no right to. It was a tough adjustment, figuring out how to be a normal person, a constant process Zuko thought would never end, but he had been moving forward rather nicely and now he was embarrassed and felt like he took five thousand steps back. 

Sokka looked almost apologetic for a second, but then his eyes lit up and he puffed out his chest in the way he always did when he was about to say something he thought was funny. “You don’t need me to do that, buddy. You make yourself look stupid all on your own.” 

Zuko took a deep breath and closed his eyes. This was a party. He was not going to cause an incident at a party. His friends were having fun and he didn’t want to ruin that for them. He didn’t want his impulsiveness to ruin Katara’s night. Zuko wasn’t going to start a fist fight with Sokka at his own house because he was in a bad mood. “You’re a piece of shit.” He said before walking away, not bothering to listen to Sokka’s response. 

The Corbray house was right by the sea, a few minute’s walk from cliffs that lead straight down into the icy oceans that were common this far north. The lights of the house became more and more distant as Zuko walked, occasionally looking back to see the party roar on without him. The further away he got, the roar of the party was drowned out by the roar of the sea, breaking mercilessly against the rocks and sending sea foam up into the air. The foam almost came close enough to hit his face, but it never quite got there. It certainly wasn’t for lack of effort, though. In the dark, the water looked almost black and he couldn’t help but imagine some sort of monster lurking beneath the surface, ready to come up and eat him alive. It would be the fitting end of a relatively useless life. The whole thing seemed like a trick to deliberately hurt him. Logically, Zuko knew things didn’t work like that. He knew that there wasn’t some great conspiracy against him. Bad things happened to him because bad things happened to anyone. Still, that was how it felt and he could feel himself beginning to wallow in it. 

And then, footsteps. Soft and distant at first, but they got louder as they came closer. Someone’s sneakers hit the ground again and again, certain of their destination. Zuko didn’t want to be bothered. He wanted to be left alone to be miserable in peace. He didn’t want to make anyone else suffer with him. Ready to tell the person to go away, he turned around and there was Katara heading straight towards him. Zuko knew that talking to Katara would be the right thing to do. Katara would understand why he was upset and try to help him and remind him that he was being stupid and that none of this was a big deal. He should stay right there and talk to her, but the idea of having to have another emotional conversation, of having to drag her into his stupid problems once again, was repulsive to him. She should be out there having fun with the rest of the school. Katara shouldn’t have to waste her night worrying about him. 

The cliffs were high, but not high enough to kill him if he jumped. Zuko was a fair swimmer and land was pretty close by the spot he would end up in. It was a ridiculous plan, sure, but it was the only escape he saw from making things even worse. He would have to swim for a few yards and then he would be in the clear. Katara was probably the most stubborn person he knew and easily one of the strongest swimmers he had ever met, but certainly she wasn’t stubborn enough to follow him off of a cliff. Katara was smarter than that. Comforting himself with that knowledge, Zuko took a few steps backwards and got a running start before jumping. 

As he fell through the air, he heard Katara stop for a second and yell out “Zuko!”, but it was too late. He was already heading down into the water feet-first. His escape, while silly, had been successful. When he hit the water, all the confetti and sparkles got off of him and everything was silent and peaceful and perfect. If not for the fact that he needed oxygen, Zuko would’ve been happy to stay down there forever. 

When Zuko looked up, he saw Katara flying through the air, heading right down into the sea. She was jumping headfirst and was entirely unafraid of anything that could be waiting below. Zuko loved her for that, but it also made him want to hit his head off a wall. Katara hit the water and was gone from his sight, somewhere beneath the surface where she would soon emerge and probably give him the lecture of a lifetime.

“Shit.” He muttered, shaking his head at the whole scenario. Zuko wanted to avoid the lecture he would get and the conversation it would result in, but he wasn’t about to leave her alone in the ocean. He would find her and they would go back to land together and Zuko would accept that there were some things he couldn’t get out of and maybe, years from now, they would laugh about the whole thing. It would be pretty easy. Zuko took a deep breath and went back under the water, keeping his eyes open for Katara. 

He couldn’t find her. 

She wasn’t in front of him, wasn’t behind him, wasn’t anywhere to the side. Zuko swimmed closer to the cliffs, stopping to take a breath every couple of seconds, but he couldn’t find her. The water was too dark and the moon was too dim and his eyes too bad to spot her. After a minute that felt like a century, he saw something toffee-colored and then something green that looked like fabric. He was pretty sure Katara had been wearing a green shirt, sure enough to swim towards the spot and then there she was. Weirdly enough, she wasn’t swimming. _She should be swimming_ Zuko thought as he got closer. _Why isn’t she swimming?_

There wasn’t enough time to ask her this. Maybe the jump had taken her off guard. That seemed unlike Katara, but Zuko could question that later. Maybe she just didn’t like heights or something. He dragged her to shore, unaccustomed to the extra weight that holding someone behind him caused, but Zuko managed to do it. 

“I can’t move.” Katara choked out as soon she coughed up most of the water from her lungs. She coughed again and looked up at Zuko with wide, horrified eyes. “Zuko, I can’t move.”

Zuko kneeled down next to her and tried not to panic. He held her hand in his as she started to explain. “I jumped down after you and then--God, I shouldn’t have gone head first, why did I go head first?--I think I hit a log and then my legs just wouldn’t and my arms just won’t and--I can’t move! I keep trying but I just _can’t_!”

Katara, in all of her frustration and confusion, felt tears begin to mix in with the water on her face. Zuko blinked once and forced himself to comprehend the situation. Katara just jumped off of a cliff and couldn’t move and it was his fault. It was his fault and his responsibility to fix it, but more than that, Katara was his friend (or maybe a little bit more, but now wasn’t the time to think about that). He had to help her. 

“It’s okay.” Zuko said, standing up and dusting off some sand before picking her up and running. “It’s all going to be okay.”

As he ran back to the house and Katara hid her face in his neck, Zuko repeated the phrase. If he said that it was going to be okay enough time, it might just happen. It was all going to be okay. Katara would be okay. All of this would be okay. 

They eventually ended up back at her house, standing at the edge of the party. One attendee, a sweet-looking freshman that Zuko recognized from his lunch, looked at them as if they had three heads. 

“Go get Sokka. Tell him we have to go to the hospital right now.” He demanded and the girl ran off, making her way through a sea of increasingly confused party goers. It took less than a minute for Sokka to appear and he raised an eyebrow at them, seemingly about to make a joke before Katara said “Sokka, I can’t move!”

“What? What do you mean you can’t move?” He asked, unable to grasp the situation. 

“I mean I can’t move!” She yelled. “I think I broke my neck and I can’t move.”

“Oh my God. We need to...Someone needs to...Where’s my phone? I just had my phone. I swear that I just had it.” Sokka started rummaging through his pockets before actually remembering that Zuko was there. “What do you have to do with this?”

“I…” Zuko tried to find the words to explain that all of this was his fault, but they just weren’t there and there was no time. “Don’t worry about an ambulance, it’ll take them twenty minutes to get up here. Just get your car and let’s go.”

Sokka was able to find his keys and ran to the car with Zuko and Katara right behind him. Once they got Katara settled into the backseat, Sokka started driving and Zuko called the hospital, forcing himself to explain that his friend had possibly broken her neck and couldn’t move and that they were on the way. They sped through the familiar streets and Katara tried to force herself to stop crying, but it was all too new and too familiar at the same time and the tears just wouldn’t stop coming. She could see Zuko holding her hand, but she couldn’t feel the sensation. 

When they pulled into the hospital, a stretcher and two paramedics were already waiting for them and they whisked Katara away. Sokka followed them, telling them who to call and what her name was and everything they needed to know. Zuko was left to the hospital waiting room, drenched to the bone and shivering. A passing nurse handed him a blanket and he sat. Only once he left Iroh a long string of messages explaining where he was and what happened did he allow himself to put his head down and weep. 

***

Katara, once she went through the mess of arriving at the hospital and being rushed into surgery, slept for two days straight. She had always been energetic and quick to recover, but the whole ordeal of breaking her neck and the anesthetics they gave her combined to make her thoroughly exhausted. In those two days, people shuffled in and out of the hospital, leaving flowers and cards and, in the case of Toph, a sign that just read _Get better, bitch_. It was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes and Katara couldn’t help but laugh. Of course Toph would make her that sign. 

She still couldn’t move. 

When she turned her head (She could still move her head. She had been able to move her head right after the accident and she could still move it now. She at least had that), she saw her father and Sokka sitting there. Sokka was playing a game on his phone and her father was sleeping, his head resting against the bright white hospital walls. All things considered, Katara’s room was nice. There were flowers everywhere and her window had a nice view of a nearby field. If she had been here for anything else, it might’ve been calming. 

“Hey.” She said to Sokka, deciding that it was the best place to start. When he saw that she was awake, his whole face lit up.

“Katara!” He exclaimed, hopping up from his seat and nearly sending the little plastic thing to the floor in his excitement. He went to hug her and then stopped, turning to their father and shaking him awake. “Dad, wake up! Katara’s up!”

Right after that, there were a flurry of doctors and nurses. With their identical scrubs and similar faces, it was hard for her to tell them apart. They asked her to confirm her name, who the President was, what month it was, how she was feeling, if she could wiggle her toes or kick her legs or make a fist or follow a light with her eyes. Every time she couldn’t do something, a nurse would cluck her tongue and write something down on her clipboard. They looked somewhere between pitying and annoyed and Katara wanted to scream at them to just tell her when she would be able to move again, but she waited until they finished their tests. They couldn’t tell her what was happening if they didn’t know, after all. 

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with me?” Katara asked the kindest-looking of the doctors, a woman in her fifties with iron-gray hair. 

“Of course.” She pulled up an x-ray of someone’s broken neck and showed it to her. “This is your neck. Right after your accident, when you hit that log, you broke a vertebrae in your neck. More specifically, you broke this one.” The doctor stopped and pointed at a bone towards the top of the x-ray. “That’s your C4. The break also seems to have done a number on your spinal cord. Right now, from the tests we just did, it looks like you can’t move anything below that spot, which would be right around here.” Then she poked a spot on Katara’s neck a little above her shoulder blades. 

“But that won’t last forever, right? I’m the captain of the lacrosse team. I have to be able to move.” She said, half-hoping her authority as lacrosse team captain would somehow make her spinal cord go back to where it was supposed to be and fix everything. 

The doctor looked back at the x-ray instead of at her. “We’ll see. Physical therapy can help in some cases, but only time will tell. I wouldn’t worry about lacrosse for right now, though. The healing process--when it’s successful, that is--can take months or even years. You’re almost certainly out for this season.”

The news hit Katara all at once and more than upset, she was disappointed. All of the work she had put into it would be for nothing if she couldn’t lead her team. How could she lead them from a wheelchair? How could she do anything from a wheelchair? “Alright.” She said. “So, we’ll just have to wait, then?”

“Exactly. I hope you feel better soon, honey. If you need anything, have your father or brothen push that red button by your head and a nurse will be right over.” With that, the doctor left and Katara was left with the fact that she still couldn’t move and might never move again. 

A silence fell over the room when the doctor left. Her father and brother were waiting for her reaction, or at least that was what Katara thought. She was thinking too many things at once to properly decide on which one to tell them. Should she talk about her disappointment about lacrosse? About how she couldn’t stop thinking about how she would be able to keep up with schoolwork and sport and student council and Model UN when she would be stuck in the hospital for possibly months? About how she was scared beyond words of having to be stuck relying on other people for the rest of her life? About how she wanted someone to get the piece of hair out of her face because she could no longer do it on her own? About how worried she was about them and Zuko and the rest of her friends? There was no clear starting point, so Katara just sighed and said nothing as she tried to organize her thoughts into some sort of order. In an attempt to comfort her, her father put a hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t cruel enough to remind him that she couldn’t feel it. 

“It’s all Zuko’s fault.” Sokka said, breaking the silence rather suddenly. “If it hadn’t been for Zu--”

“No, it’s not.” Katara cut him off, not even wanting to hear it. “He jumped off the cliff. I jumped after him. That’s that. It was my choice, but it’s not like it was my fault, either. I didn’t go out there to try and break my neck! It just happened, and it isn’t anyone’s fault.”

“But if he hadn’t jumped--”

Katara cut him off again, deciding it would be best to use his own train of thought against him so that it might get through his thick skull how stupid it was to go back and blame an accident like that on a person who had almost nothing to do with it. “And if you hadn’t been so much of an asshole that he felt the need to leave and hang out by a cliff and then jump--probably to avoid having to deal with talking about it, knowing him--it wouldn’t have happened.” Sokka looked horrified by the idea that Katara actually thought that and she shook her head at him. “Do you see how stupid you sound now? It isn’t anyone’s fault and that’s the beginning and end of it.”

“I guess.” Sokka conceded, fiddling with his thumbs the way that he always did when he lost a fight with his sister. 

“You’re a wise one, Katara.” Her father smiled at her and moved her hair out of her face. 

“Thank you.” She smiled over at him, genuinely thankful for his kindness. After hanging around Zuko for the better part of two years, Katara understood that a good father was a rare blessing and she only felt more lucky to have him every day. “And next time a doctor comes by, remind me to ask about when they’ll start physical therapy. The sooner I can walk again, the better.”

***

Zuko didn’t come to the hospital for six days. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go. It was just that he figured that Katara never wanted to see him again. It was all his fault. He had been argumentative and impulsive and stupid and because of that, she was paralyzed, possibly for life. Aang had called and so had Toph, but Zuko didn’t answer his phone. They probably were just going to officially and formally tell him that they hated him for paralyzing their friend, and that wasn’t something he wanted to hear. Once Sokka started texting him, Zuko turned off his phone. He didn’t want to deal with his anger. He didn’t want to deal with the outside world at all. He didn’t even read the messages. It would be useless to do that. He already knew what they would say. 

For the first three days, Iroh had given his only employee and only nephew time to himself. He was excused from work and helping with dinner and from cleaning the house and from doing anything but moping. Iroh gave him endless cups of peppermint tea and asked him how he was feeling, but Zuko always just shook his head and thanked him for the tea. He didn’t want to talk about it. 

On the fourth day after the accident, Zuko got back to work. It would keep him from dwelling on the fact that he was now all alone again. He had grown used to having friends, but he had to accept that they would all hate him now, possibly even more than he hated himself for causing all of this. But it couldn’t bother him when he had no time to think about it. All Zuko thought about was tea and the shop’s floors and where they would put the new tables they bought and if candles were a good idea for when it got dark outside because it would add more of a mood lighting than lamps. Any time his uncle tried to ask how he was doing, he would just artfully deflect the question and get Iroh talking about tea, a trick Azula had used a thousand times when they were younger and she wanted time to create some scheme while their uncle was around. It felt underhanded to use it now, but it seemed like the best way to deal with things. 

After six days, Iroh sat him down in the back of the shop, handed him another cup of tea, and said what he had been thinking for the past six days. “Zuko, you need to go visit that girl.”

Zuko sighed loudly and drained half of his tea in one sip. “I want to, but she probably doesn’t want to see me ever again. The whole thing is my fault.”

“No, it isn’t.” Iroh shook his head at his nephew. “It was an accident.”

“Yes, it is! If it wasn’t for me, everything would be fine right now and Katara knows that.” He insisted, his grip on the tea cup tightening to the point that his knuckles turned white. “She hates me. They all hate me now.”

Iroh took a sip of his own tea before answering, carefully choosing his words so that Zuko would understand that it was almost certainly for the best that he went. “Well, it can never hurt to check, can it? And if she’s that upset with you, I’m sure she’ll want to give you a proper scolding, won’t she?” 

“...She would, yeah.” He admitted quietly. 

“And it would be proper to listen to what she has to say, wouldn’t it?”

“...It would.”

“Exactly! And if she isn’t upset with you, she certainly misses you. Either way, I would bet half of the tea cups in this shop that Katara wants to see you.” Iroh gave him a smile and Zuko let out another sigh. 

“You know, I really hate it when you’re right.” He said, almost feeling better when his uncle laughed. And so it was decided. Zuko would go and see Katara the next day.

***

Zuko arrived at the hospital around ten in the morning, holding a bouquet of flowers and trying to look as normal as possible. A nurse had given him the directions to Katara’s room and he ended up lingering in the hall for ten minutes, trying to gather the courage to go inside. It would be much easier to run away and pretend like he had never shown up at all and go back to his own world of misery and isolation, but the time for running was over. If people were going to be upset with him, he needed to face it. 

He knocked on the door to the room once and waited for some sort of response from within. For a second, it seemed like nothing was going to happen until Zuko heard a voice that was clearly Katara’s say “It should be open!”

Zuko tested the doorknob. It was. He entered the room and carefully closed the door behind him. Somehow, Zuko expected that when he entered and saw Katara, that she would look somehow different than before, but she looked very much the same. A little thinner from hospital food, maybe, but not too noticeably. It was still Katara sitting there, looking at him in shock as if he grew a third arm and started speaking Swahili. 

“Hey.” Zuko said, not knowing how else to start. He placed the flowers on the windowsill and stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m sorry about not coming to see you sooner. I thought that--It just seemed like--I figured that--”

“Of course you did.” Katara shook her head, not even needing for him to finish the thought for her to know what he was trying to say. “And of course I want to see you! You’re my friend.”

Zuko sighed in relief and sunk into the chair beside her bed. “I’m sorry. About everything. And if you’re mad at me, I totally understand, but...I’ve just missed you. I’ve missed you a lot.”

“I missed you, too.” Katara smiled at him for half a second just to let him know that everything was okay. “And don’t worry, no one’s mad at you. It was an accident. People understand that. And if they don’t...Well, I’ll _make_ them understand.”

Zuko couldn’t help but chuckle, an awkward sound because he hadn’t laughed at anything for a little more than a week. It was almost like he had forgotten how. But of course Katara would still be ready to fight the entire earth just to make her point. Nothing could change that. “You definitely will. But how have you been? Is everything okay here? The hospital staff is good? You’re getting everything you need? Nothing’s gone wrong?”

“It isn’t too bad here. I mean, I can’t do much, but that’s just part of being in the hospital. Some of the doctors were uppity, but I found one that I like and I got cleared to start physical therapy tomorrow, so I should be back to normal in no time.” Katara had no doubt that she would be back to her normal activities come the fall. Nothing could persuade her. No amount of x-rays of her broken neck or the fact that she had yet to be able to move anything beneath her shoulder or statistics could talk her out of it. She had doubted it in the first few days, but now she couldn’t afford to doubt. If she doubted that she could get better, that doubt would eat her alive. 

“Really?” Zuko’s face lit up at the concept and he smiled for the first time in a week. “The doctors are sure?”

“Well, no, but I’m sure.” Katara told him, shaking her head to get a piece of hair out of her face. She made a note to ask Toph to braid her hair when she visited next just to keep it from happening. It was frustrating, to not be able to do that herself, but that was just how things were for the moment. “Anyways, how have you been? And how are things with the shop?”

They spent the rest of the time talking about Uncle Iroh and his endless shopping for more flavors of tea and Aang nearly crashing a car into a stop sign while trying to learn how to drive and every other stupid thing that was going on in the world. It was all so stupid, all so charmingly normal, that both of them almost forgot the specifics of the situation that got them into that hospital room. Before he left to go to work, Zuko promised that he would be back, and the next day, he was. 

***

The thing about Katara’s certainty that she would get one hundred percent better was that no amount of thinking it could make it happen. No matter how certainly she said it, she just couldn’t get her legs to move or for her fingers to bend or for anything to work how it was supposed to. At first, it seemed easy to blame her physical therapist, but the logical part of Katara knew that her therapist was good. It was her body that wasn’t cooperating, and there was little that could be done for that. 

Zuko visited every day, bringing back lacrosse scores and everything Katara missed at school and her favorite chocolates and even tea from his uncle’s shop. It was a little embarrassing at first because he had to feed the food he brought to her, but Katara managed to get over it. She wasn’t lesser as a person just because she couldn’t move her arms. 

One day, about three weeks after she had been admitted to the hospital, her physical therapist introduced her to the weirdest looking wheelchair Katara had ever seen. It looked normal at first, just like every other wheelchair in the hospital, but there was a straw attached to it. “What’s that for?” She asked, raising an eyebrow at the device. 

“It’s called the Sip-and-Puff.” Her physical therapist said, setting Katara down in the chair. “When you give it a short inhale, it moves the chair backwards and when you give it a short exhale, it moves you forwards. There’s also ways to get it to turn, but we’ll worry about those in a minute. For now, let’s just get you going forwards.”

Katara looked at the straw and then at her therapist, who was smiling down at her with bright, hopeful eyes, and understood that she wasn’t getting her limbs back. There had been no progress, no chance of progress, and the rest of her life would see her in a wheelchair. She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be upset, to admit that the whole thing was upsetting and stupid and not fair, not fair at all, but it was happening anyways and the only thing left to do was for her to accept it and move on with life. If they had found a way for her to operate a wheelchair without her arms, certainly there were ways for her to stay on student council and figure out what she was going to do for a career and live the life she had always dreamed of. There would be a way and if there wasn’t, she would make one. Katara might not have been able to make her legs move by the sheer force of her mental effort, but there were other problems she could fix with that. 

Katara opened her eyes and nodded at her therapist. “Alright. Let’s go forwards.”

***

A week after figuring out her new wheelchair, Katara got to go home. While she was in the hospital, her father and Sokka and Zuko had rearranged the furniture so that she was able to navigate the house more easily and moved the stuff from her bedroom onto the first floor. Eventually, she’d find a way to get up stairs, but that was a problem for another day. She spent most of the day wheeling around the house, figuring out where to turn and getting her bearings back. Sure, she had rammed into Sokka more than once (and maybe one or two of those times were on purpose), but Katara figured everything out quickly enough. 

Then there was the matter of school. She made a call to the office (even if Zuko had to dial the phone, but that was just semantics) and asked to talk to the principal about when she could come back. 

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” He said when he heard Katara’s request. “While you’re a valued student here, certainly there are...special schools designed for your sort of people.”

“My sort of people?” Katara repeated into the phone. “What do you mean, ‘my sort of people’? People in wheelchairs? While I’m sure there probably are schools that are just for people in wheelchairs, I’ve gone to school here my whole life. Just because you don’t want to deal with a paralyzed student, I’m not going to change my plans.”

“Miss Corbray, you know that isn’t what I meant.” The principal said, clearly uncomfortable with being called out. Zuko had to hide a grin beneath his hands, proud that Katara was putting him in his place. 

“Really? Because that’s sure what it sounded like to me. You aren’t getting rid of me that quickly, and I still have things to talk with you about involving the school board. The fact that you won’t use the funding for new textbooks is _ridiculous_ , and you know it. So, tell my teachers to send my work home with Zuko or Sokka and I’ll be seeing you in September, sir. Hopefully by then, you won’t be wandering around with your foot in your mouth.” Katara made a face at Zuko and he hung up the phone. She let out a huff and Zuko ruffled her hair. 

“You must be feeling better.” He said happily. “You’ve already got the energy to be pissed.”

Katara laughed at that assessment. “Really? That’s your gauge for improvement?”

“It’s not wrong.” Zuko reminded, and she nodded in agreement. It was better than the depression she almost slipped into at the hospital, in that long interval before physical therapy and before Zuko visited, where she thought that she’d never be able to do anything again. 

“It’s certainly not.”

Every day after that, Zuko helped her with schoolwork. Sometimes he stayed at her house, sitting on her bed and writing out the answers she gave him on the pile of worksheets she had missed, even when Katara sometimes gave him the wrong ones. Essays were done with a voice-to-text program they had found and they put their heads together to figure out how to get another one of the straws she had for her wheelchair to attach to her computer. On other days, days when schoolwork seemed like too much, Katara went over to the tea shop and took orders, remembering all of them and wheeling back to the kitchen to give them to Zuko. Iroh gave her a fair paycheck, which she mostly spent on books on the history of activism. 

Katara spent a fair amount of time reading about the struggles people in her position faced, about getting fired just because they were in a wheelchair or being denied insurance and drowning in medical bills and everything else that could go wrong. She knew that none of this was cheap, that her father hid the medical bills from her to keep her from stressing about it too much without realizing that just made her think about it more, but they were lucky enough to have good insurance. Many people weren’t. With her voice-to-text program, she composed an endless litany of letters to Senators and Congressmen and the Governor. Sometimes they responded. Mostly they didn’t, but that didn't mean that Katara was going to stop. 

After more fussing with the guidance office, Katara got her school schedule for next year. It was August, a little over five months over the accident, and things were almost entirely normal. She read it to Zuko while he brushed her hair and commented idly on her classes. He seemed a bit distracted, like his mind was up in the clouds that hung around the summer sun, and it was more than just the normal distraction that occurred just before he went to work.

“What are you thinking about?” She asked, looking at Zuko out of the corner of her eye. 

“Nothing much.” He said, twirling the brush in his hands. “It's just that there’s a movie coming out on Friday and I was wondering if...I thought that maybe you would like to go with me? If you don’t, it’s fine, I get it, I understand, I relate, but I…I want to go with you.”

Katara rolled her eyes at him and then smiled. Sure, this wasn’t how she imagined she’d be asked on her first date, but it was somehow better than the silly ideas she had thought of before she knew what it was like to actually like someone. “Of course I want to go.”

“As more than friends? Maybe?”

“As more than friends. Definitely.”

Zuko ran the brush through her hair one more time and then gave her a kiss on the forehead. It was sudden and sweet and his face was so red that Katara was almost worried that he had a fever, but he was far too happy for someone who might’ve had the flu. “Then I’ll see you then. I have to run.”

“See you then!” 

Zuko left after that and Katara was left smiling at her schedule as if it understood exactly why she was so happy. Things were different now, and things were difficult, and some days Katara just wanted to lay her head down and scream, but overall, it was okay. _No._ She thought. _It’s much better than okay._


End file.
